Sunday, August 26, 2007 Sun.star essay: Rain or no rain By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
REMEMBER how one could casually say, “I think it’s going to rain,” then it rained?
A 1910 author, Mary Helen Fee, wrote “A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines” which is fiction but based on her experience in the country. From the casual remark about rain, she’d continue:
“Then the weather thickens, and a fine drizzling rain sets in. It stops by and by…Then the rain begins again with a steady downpour, which makes you wonder if there will be any left for next year.
Again it stops…Then a little vagrant sigh of wind wafts back the deluge. A few minutes later nature sighs again with more tears. Each gust is stronger than the one before it, and at the end of eight or ten hours the blasts are terrific, and the rain is driven like spikes…It may increase to an absolute hurricane…with great loss of life…”
Farmers need rain and would probably see it differently from Fee. What harm will it bring to pray for rain?
In the recent drought up north in Luzon, I bet a lot of prayers were sent up to the Highest, as in the prayers of farmers in Bontoc during drought, for God “to open the sky and allow raindrops to water the rice terraces and the mountains.”
Supplicants in this ceremony called Manerwap climb the mountain for the ritual and fasting. This could be for two days and two nights, also with the gongs beating.
But even the Manila Archbishop led the people in a prayer called the “Obligatory Prayer to Request for Rain,” to break the dry spell that killed the crops in Luzon.
Then it rained.
And the strong rains are here, at least in Luzon, and here as though to pour forever, commented a friend in Manila.
But there’s no harm to say a prayer for rain to stop, even as in the recent heat, there was the prayer for rain to pour.
Another friend talked about rain makers which are said also to stop rain. She said she had a couple of rain sticks and told her playful boys one summer to dance with the sticks and ask for rain. Two days after, the rains fell and the town got flooded.
A rain stick is a tribal musical instrument believed to affect the weather.
In South America, they are used by people in the Chilean desert to pray to the rain spirits. It’s made of cactus tubes with its thorns hammered inside into its soft flesh. The tube is put under the sun to dry. Then lava pebbles are poured inside the tube, then both ends sealed with pieces of wood. When it’s handled gracefully as in a dance, you’ll hear a gentle cascade of rain sounds.
In our country, there is the rain stick---a bamboo tube into which are stuck bamboo barbecue skewers. It doesn’t need drying, as with the cactus. Right off, you can pour into the tube, up to 1/10 full, beads, dried beans, pebbles, also seeds, probably sand, even uncooked rice, to achieve a full tone of rain, including depth of sound and harmony.
It’s no wonder that it is now part of our percussion instruments even if it’s still a tribal prayer. With every music we play should come a prayer for rain or no rain.
